Tagged With "health"
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Conversation with Ijeoma Oluo about body size, relationship to food, and growing up food insecure
A great discussion with writer and activist Ijeoma Oluo among other things: Ijeoma’s relationship with food growing up, including her experience with food insecurity The issues with food access for low-income people Food hoarding as a response to deprivation The impact of sexual assault on our eating behaviors The invisibility of fat bodies and the privileges of thin bodies The myth that weight loss is the cure to all ills Size discrimination Systemic injustice The impact of weight loss...
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Eating Certain Raw Fruits and Vegetables Has Been Linked to Better Mental Health [metro.co.uk/]
Raw fruits and vegetables may play a role in improving mental health, according to a new study by the University of Otago. Researchers have found that people who eat more uncooked produce tend to have fewer symptoms of depression and other mental illness, compared to those who eat cooked, canned or processed versions. More than 400 people aged between 18 and 25 were asked about their typical consumption of fruit and vegetables, including which varieties they ate and how they were prepared.
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How Nutrition Affects Teens Mental Health
"Once we've sourced our food, the next step is preparing it. This part of the process can also be an avenue for enhancing teen mental health – particularly when young people approach cooking as a creative activity that they enjoy doing with and for others. A recent study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology followed more than 650 young adults. Each day, they reported how much time they spent on creative activities and how they felt that day. The researchers found that the...
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Replacing vacant lots with green spaces eases depression
This NPR story shares recently released study supporting what we know in our bones: humans thrive with connection to nature. Read more here: Replacing vacant lots with green spaces eases depression . This study is hot off the press: " Effect of Greening Vacant Land on Mental Health of Community-Dwelling Adults: A cluster randomized trial. " "The impact was strongest for residents of poorer neighborhoods — they showed at least a 27.5 percent reduction in the prevalence of depression." "The...
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Stress Eating is Life-Affirming and Can Help Us Cope in Troubled Times
https://medium.com/@lucy.aphramor/stress-eating-is-life-affirming-and-can-help-us-cope-in-troubled-times-4a798adf1b73
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Why Nutritional Psychiatry Is The Future of Mental Health Treatment (theconversation.com)
The link between poor mental health and nutritional deficiencies has long been recognized by nutritionists working in the complementary health sector. However, psychiatrists are only now becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of using nutritional approaches to mental health.
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Re: Eating Certain Raw Fruits and Vegetables Has Been Linked to Better Mental Health [metro.co.uk/]
This is an important disclaimer from the article: "Obviously, this study isn’t claiming a cause-and-effect link between what you eat and your mental health status. Depression can’t be caused by a lack of vitamins or cured by a surplus. It simply says that there’s an association between what we eat and how we feel." However, I would love to see more research in this area. Original research paper found here .
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Re: Eating Certain Raw Fruits and Vegetables Has Been Linked to Better Mental Health [metro.co.uk/]
Of course. I don't believe there are panaceas or "miracle cures" for anything that ails us. I do believe that every little bit that we can do to improve our health matters, though, including eating plenty of fruits and vegetables. That alone won't cure depression, but it can play a big part along with other lifestyle changes and treatments.
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Re: Conversation with Ijeoma Oluo about body size, relationship to food, and growing up food insecure
Great post!! so much great info in this post. Thank you for sharing Monica! Love the social justice perspective. Wonderful resources too.
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Re: Stress Eating is Life-Affirming and Can Help Us Cope in Troubled Times
I always love reading your perspective Lucy, thank you for this thought provoking article!
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Re: Stress Eating is Life-Affirming and Can Help Us Cope in Troubled Times
I am so excited to find your prospective and website.
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‘Building Wealth and Health Network’ Reduces Food Insecurity Without Providing Food [drexel.edu]
As the coronavirus pandemic forces so many to reckon with growing food insecurity and increased health challenges, the Building Wealth and Health Network program of Drexel University’s Center for Hunger-Free Communities is reducing food insecurity and improving mental health – without distributing any food or medicine. How? By focusing on group experiences that promote healing and help people save money and take control over their own finances. Parents of young children, who completed the...
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Obesity Strategy: policies placing responsibility on individuals don't work - so why does the (UK) government keep using them?
"The government has recently announced a strategy aimed at reducing obesity in the UK. It will introduce a ban on unhealthy food advertisements on TV before a certain hour, end “buy one, get one free” junk food deals, and create more comprehensive calorie contents on food and drinks. The government has also launched the Better Health campaign, to motivate overweight and obese people to lose weight. The programme offers tools and support from NHS weight management services, including a Better...
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Weight Bias: Moving from Loud to Quiet
Weight bias is a moving target. It is moving from a shout to a quiet murmur, from explicit shaming to implicit insults. In 2015, a peer-reviewed medical journal would publish advice to tell patients bluntly that obesity is their fault.
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Nutritional Neuroscience, Whole Body Mental Health
https://onbeing.org/programs/kimberley-wilson-whole-body-mental-health/ The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and...
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Our Brains Weren't Designed for This Kind of Food
Our society has long treated weight gain as a function of insufficient willpower. If you’re overweight, it’s because you chose to be. You ate too much, or you didn’t exercise enough. You lack the virtue and the discipline of the thin. This story is great. It is great for punishing anyone who struggles with weight. It is great for justifying discrimination and maltreatment. But it is just nonsense if you take even a cursory look at the data. And Stephan Guyenet has looked — and I put this...
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Re: Our Brains Weren't Designed for This Kind of Food
On Wed, Aug 2, 2023, 11:59 AM PACEsConnection < communitymanager@acesconnection.com> wrote:
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The Link Between Highly Processed Foods and Brain Health
Roughly 60 percent of the calories in the average American diet come from highly processed foods. We’ve known for decades that eating such packaged products — like some breakfast cereals, snack bars, frozen meals and virtually all packaged sweets, among many other things — is linked to unwelcome health outcomes, like an increased risk of diabetes, obesity and even cancer. But more recent studies point to another major downside to these often delicious, always convenient foods: They appear to...
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The Surprisingly Dramatic Role of Nutrition in Mental Health | Julia Rucklidge
To listen to Julia Rucklidge TedTalk, please click here. "In 1847, a physician by the name of Semmelweis advised that all physicians wash their hands before touching a pregnant woman in order to prevent childbed fever. His research showed that you could reduce the mortality rates from septicemia from 18%, down to 2% simply through washing your hands with chlorinated lime. His medical colleagues refused to accept that they themselves were responsible for spreading infection. Semmelweis was...
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Incorporating Racial Equity into Trauma-Informed Care
Takeaways: Racism is trauma and should be treated as such in any comprehensive trauma-informed care framework. Trauma-informed care requires a nuanced understanding of not only how trauma impacts the lives and care of patients, but the root causes behind that trauma. This brief offers practical considerations to help health systems and provider practices incorporate a focus on racial equity to enhance trauma-informed care efforts. It draws from the experiences of two federally qualified...
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I’ve Always Struggled With My Weight. Losing It Didn’t Mean Winning.
There were a few bad moments, over the course of a few bad months, that led me to download the weight- loss app. These will probably sound trivial to anyone who is not me, and of course they are trivial — but we are talking about bodies here, and about my body in particular, and one of the defining features of having a body is that it is a fire hose of tiny humiliations blasting you constantly in the face, never allowing you to look away, even when you most want to. One bad moment happened...
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Using syndemic theory to understand food insecurity and diet-related chronic diseases
Syndemic Theory (ST) provides a framework to examine mutually enhancing diseases/health issues under conditions of social inequality and inequity. ST has been used in multiple disciplines to address interacting infectious diseases, noncommunicable diseases, and mental health conditions. The theory has been critiqued for its inability to measure disease interactions and their individual and combined health outcomes. This article reviews literature that strongly suggests a syndemic between...
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Whole Body Mental Health
The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what...
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The Neuroscience of Emotional Eating
For some people, no matter how much they try to eat healthy, when intense emotions surface, overcoming food cravings seems impossible. We reach for the comfort foods that we hope will make us feel better in the short term, but afterwards often end up feeling down in the dumps. That feeling of shame can be overwhelming — particularly in a diet-driven society where maintaining a healthy relationship with food is difficult, especially if it’s used as a coping mechanism. But why do some people...
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Health Equity and the Social Determinants of Health Are NOT Synonyms
Successful health equity strategies must be inclusive, and focus on all marginalized and minoritized persons and their communities. Any lesser view will continue to yield a faulty health equity equation.
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What Children Really Need Is Adults That Understand Development
The brain doesn’t fully develop until about the age of 25. This fact is sometimes quite surprising and eye opening to most adults. It can also be somewhat overwhelming for new parents and professionals who are interacting with babies and young children every day, to contemplate. It is essential to realize however, that the greatest time of development occurs in the years prior to kindergarten. And even more critical to understand is that by age three 85 percent of the core structures of the...
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Early Relational Health Innovators Partner In Program Supported by PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities Members in Twelve California Counties
Christina Bethell, Ph.D, MBA, MPH, founder of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), principal author of the groundbreaking study on positive childhood experiences, and creator of the free Well Visit Planner, among other innovations. Two internationally-respected leaders and innovators in complementary aspects of early relational health and childhood and maternal health equity recently launched a partnership they believe will benefit everyone from newborn babies and...
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Re: What Children Really Need Is Adults That Understand Development
Yes! I have been saying this (to myself mostly) for years. One cannot address ACES if understanding of child development is not part of it.
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Re: Why Nutritional Psychiatry Is The Future of Mental Health Treatment (theconversation.com)
I like the idea of nutritional psychiatry that takes into account individual needs. I think it's important to not only eat healthy foods, but also take natural supplements that can improve your mood and reduce stress. For example, I read that theanine and vitamins can increase dopamine and serotonin levels in the brain, which promotes relaxation and reduces anxiety. I myself tried gaba theanine from https://www.amazon.com/GABA-Su...eanine/dp/B0BZQBB3CX and felt the difference. I recommend...
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Re: Health Equity and the Social Determinants of Health Are NOT Synonyms
Thank you for drawing attention to this. I also find it frustrating. In addition to your point about "gender disparities present in pain management, especially for those who identify as women" I would also add that there are sex based differences in that females are more likely to suffer from immune disorders, inflammatory, menstrual, and menopausal health issues that are under recognized and under treated.